Jailhouse Grooming

Bert Burykill, our anonymous prison correspondent who was recently set free, found this old thing he wrote while locked up. The above photo is from 2007. Bert says he used to send it out to “bitches looking for ass ‘n’ cash.”

Bein’ stuck in jail is one of the illest mindfucks available to humanity. Prisoners suffer from extreme sensory deprivation and a complete lack of privacy, which causes some of us to become overly obsessive and anal, and others to hide in their shells and do nothing. There aren’t too many productive things we can do in jail, so we just front and make it seem like we’re the shit. But really we ain’t shit. We’re excrement on the face of humanity, shaving for two hours a day just because we’re bored and stupid.

I sure get real pretty in prison, though. I’m so furious with my hair-pluckin’ I kill a pair of tweezers about every three months. I don’t even shave my face—I just tweeze out all the offending hairs. I am also a chronic asshole tweezer. I have so little poo-hole hair that I don’t even need to wipe half the time. It’s a lifestyle.

I put cocoa butter on my toast. It’s from Africa and it’s good for my complexion. It tastes pretty dang bonerable, too. It’s like chocolate toast crunch with soybean oil. I also purchase Wheatena for very cheap on the prison black market. It’s cheap because it tastes like bird shit, but I feel as if it makes my dick full of power and fiber. Nobody in the mess hall wants it so they pawn pounds off to a real fancy cracker like me. I supply them with a meager few stamps and receive such favorable caloric density it’s crazy. I think I’ll live forever as long as I’m not in jail.

I frequently eat my sperm just because it seems like the healthy thing to do. It’s about as intimate as I’m going to get in the cesspool of corrections, and If I’m not going to taste anyone else’s fucky juices for a couple-year clip, I might as well sample my own flavor syrup, lo mein? I hear it has a lot of protein for the skin!

I put my Banquet fried chicken ($4.96/box) in the microwave for 39 minutes and then let it cool for five minutes before feeding the crispy skin batter to my friends. Then they put the skin back in the microwave and cook it longer. They call it coochi Fritos. I read that human beings who lift a lot of weights are allowed to eat copious amounts of saturated fat, and that it’s likely that it actually makes our brains bigger and better. The fact that it might shrink the sperm count production of my balls (because chicken fat is detrimental to the blood circulation in a man’s scrotum) doesn’t mean shit to me because I’m in jail.

In prison, my face is very important. It must look very mean and hard, but also surprisingly intelligent. Therefore, I tweeze my whole face, but also use a mayonnaise mask bedazzled with a ketchup splash. The egg whites in mayo activate positive proteins to make me look fierce while ketchup secretes sugars that extract poisons, which culminates in the look of a sweet and weathered young gentile who’s ready to murder whoever for a single rollie.

It is completely acceptable for one white male to receive a moisturized back rubdown from another white male. If we didn’t do this, our backsides would be unbearably itchy against the fibrous canvas of our reprehensible government linens. The cleaners wash them with harsh chemicals that cause my rashes to bloom feverishly. I counteract the red disease with pads of margarine from the mess hall. The high sodium content in margarine annihilates the allergic reaction to the insidious phosphates in the industrial-strength Corcraft cleaning chemicals.

Nothing about jail is lovely, but if my pubes are clean-shaven I feel a hell of a lot fresher. I’m an insomniac, so I often lie in bed with tweezers plucking all extraneous hairs. I think that the more hair I destroy, the less dirty I am. Plus, I really have nothing else to do and it feels stimulating to yank them out all by myself.

Most inmates I talk to display similar behavior. Really the best thing most of us can practice in jail is our hygiene. We can be clean all the time, because we have nothing else to do but scrub ourselves. I go through 12 ounces of cocoa butter every two weeks, and I feel great. I endorse using African cocoa butter internally and externally with all my heart. My life has been so much better because of it.